Diagnose And Manage Your Hard Disks

Hard drives don't last forever. In fact, they fail more often than you might think. If your hard drive has ever crashed, you know the hassle it can cause.Here are 2 utilities to  diagnose your hard drive.

HDDScan is a freeware utility for storage devices diagnostics .The program can scan storage device for Bad-blocks, show S.M.A.R.T. attributes.It basically provides the user with information about the hard disks that are installed on his computer, with ways to tests those hard disks and with options to change certain settings of those hard disks.

Supported storage devices:

• ATA/SATA HDD.
• SCSI HDD.
• USB HDD (see Appendix A).
• FireWire or IEEE 1394 HDD (see Appendix A).
• RAID volumes made of ATA/SATA/SCSI HDDs (surface tests only).
• USB Flash (surface tests only).

SysReq:  Windows 2K/XP/2003/Vista|1.74 MB|Freeware| Download

HD Tune is another  hard Disk utility which has the following functions:

• Benchmark: measures the raw performance
• Transfer Rate
• Access Time
• CPU Usage
• Burst Rate
• Hard Disk information which includes partition information, supported features, firmware version, serial number, disk capacity, buffer size, transfer mode
• Hard Disk Health
• S.M.A.R.T. Information (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)
• Power On Time
• Error scan
• Temperature display

You can use it to measures the raw performance of your drive(s), including transfer rate, burst rate, access time and more. In addition, it provides detailed information about supported hard drive features, as well as current temperature, S.M.A.R.T. Information (if available) and an error scanner.

SysReq: Windows 2000/2003/Vista/XP | Freeware |583 kb | Download

Category: Freeware, Hard Disk, Hardware Monitoring, Utility